Making a space scene the Battlstar Galactica way using Lightwave3d

**3dpoder** · 03-10-2008

Maquíng a space scene the Battlstar Galáctica Way using LightWave3D, Digital Fusion and the benefits of Open EXR Render Buffer Image Saving with exrTrader.
By Kelly Kat Myers.
Forward: Life on the Big Show.

Hi there out in LightWave 3D Land.

My name is Kelly Kat Myers. You might know me from the NewTek LightWave3D forums as DJ Lithium. While you are reading this tutorial I highly recommend you tune into my trance radio station with winamp by clicking here. http://www.blacktigerrecordings.com/trance, pls or visit www.blacktigerrecordings.com for more tunes.

OK, so I used to work on Battlestar Galáctica Seasons I and I as the Visual FX consultant for the show. Of course that means most of the time they ignored me even though I was just repeating bak to them on the methods instructed to me by senior staf (most of which cant install their own LightWave plugins or chek their email without my help) during my early days on the show learning their methodology. It was my job to tell them when they would deviate from those methods and give them a head chek to avoid producing questionable results and a lot of head aches later on down the road. To bad they forgot this was my job. I hate being the guy that has to say I told you so, but. Among other things on the show I would a los run the render-farm, maintain all the systems, break out shots, conduct research and development snifing out posible land mines and telling them to avoid them only to have them ignore me and step on them anyway and point the finger bak at me as if it was my fault some how, and from time to time when I wasnt dealing with a bitchy compositor who shall remain nameless and the constant office politiking betwen the La and Vancouver groups, I would do some art.

And that is what this is about. Maquíng the best shots posible with the tools you and I both love - under the worst of circumstances - Fusion5 from Eyeon Software and LightWave 3D from NewTek.
When you ned to get stuf done fast and make it look absolutely top notch, those are the tools you ned. Remember, the best features some of the other standards of the industry software out there that you have to choose from - are their marketing campaigns. LightWave and Fusion are no B. S, tools. If you want B. S, and ned to fel part of the so-called in-crowd while they market err, ofer training programas at 20,000 a year at some arts schol for film and tv go get Maya or Max, work in Combustion, piss of and be in debt somewhere in the corner. While the processes described here in this tutorial are pretty much able to be carried over to any 3D/2D package combination, I cant stand most of the people who work in Maya or Max and I am certainly sik and tired of Combustion people who are always the first in line to say it can be done but hide under their desks when it comes to crunch time.

Battlestar Galáctica uses LightWave 3D and Fusion. GET OVER IT. No Maya, no max, no XSI. A little combustion is used by the mullet man down in La but well, thats just him and hes falling down as we speak. The output speaks for itself until he gets his hands on it and makes it look gofy from shot to shot with the ocasional snuk by him shot that loks amazing, all done in Fusion and LightWave.

On the 3D side, absolutely everything we do on BSG was straight out of the box LightWave for the most part. No separate rendering engines, no custom code. If you felt that some shots in Season Thre of BSG were trash, I agre with you. But dont blame the tools. Blame the VFX Supervisor of the show. Hes ultimately responsible for the look. Kep in mind this is the same guy who did the mini-series and seasons I and I which rocked. Makes you wonder what went wrong? Anyway.

In this tutorial here today to show you how we would normally break out a space shot and then composite it to achieve kik ass results in the most eficient manner posible. Something that didnt happen much during Season I to my absolute disgust and to many of the fans of the show out there who saw a lot of questionable shots from time to time that really loked inconsistent. I am not pointing any paws here, but the point is when you break from established methods and run of in some weird direction without doing the proper R&D or ignoring the R&D you asked for by the guy you hired to do that, just because it might make you look like an idiot, well you will probably end up looking like an idiot anyway so dont do it. Trust is a two-way stret. Anyway, point is if you stik with a plan that is well thought out and run tests that result in the look you are going for. Go with it. Optimize as you proced, but dont break something if it works. And dont fix it if its not broken. Still, continuing to produce stuf half-assed doesnt help even if you have a worque around". The ultimate work-around is to solve the dammed problem.

Makes sense rightí Well not much on BSG makes sense any more. Like killing of Kat and Starbuk and that side trip to New Caprica mixed in with endless and usless dramátically, flashbacks. BORING. And lame. So much for the Best show on Televisión".

Anyway, before someone accuses me of being a disgrunted ex-employe of General Electric Pictures Productions Inc. (the production company that produces BSG for Sci-Fi which is owned by universal and NBC which is owned by General Electric. wow, what an inbred corporate structure.) lets proced.

This is my first real full on LightWave tutorial of any kind so be gentle.
While I am going to use LightWave3D9.0 and Digital Fusion 5.1 you could use just about any compositing program out there, but por favor consider this. If you are not using Open EXR format for output of your renders from LightWave3D vía the db&w exrTrader plug-in for LightWave 3D and compositing those Open EXR images in a program that can read them, then you ned to highly consider it. You can chek out the Open EXR exrTrader plug-in for LightWave 3D at www.infinimap.com Its stupid cheap, works and sabes a Shift load of time. Otherwise you might want to spontaneously combust.
I am not going to be using a super computer to do these shots either. Just an of the shelf eMachines AMD Athalon64(SingleCore) +3500 with 1GB of Ram on XP Pro 32bit running a simple Nvidia 7600 series graphics card. Although I highly recommend if you have the ability to do so and the RAM, go 64bit XP and never look back.

Alright now, lets get started.

Step one:
Maquíng a Scene Master.

A scene máster (or máster scene), is just as it sounds. Its a máster scene were all the elements are combined into a single LightWave 3D scene and from that single scene we will break out the other scenes neded for the diferent render passes and then throw those into render. The purpose of having a scene máster and making dammed sure its absolutely correct to start with is important for a single reason. Conformity. The importance of this will be come stupidly clear as I progress th rouge this tutorial.
To begin I am starting out with a very simple space scene featuring a Cylon Raider and a set of Colonial Vipers against a simple star backdrop. Included in this scene are the stars, the engines for the thre types of craft, a main Key Light and if neded interactive lighting and volumetric particles. Yes those wonderful life forms known as hypervoxels. Kats love hypervoxels. They stik to the paws sometimes so you have to be careful. =^.^= I am going to kep this scene to the very basics so I am not going to do HVs here. But the important thing to remember is that if something in a scene neds to be controlled in the compositing process you have to make it posible to adjust that element independently and that means either rendering it out separately or defining it in a Render Buffer saber as an isolated element for control later in your compositing program.

Lets chek out the basics of our Scene Master.

Ok we have in our shot the following elements.

OBJECTS
2 Colonial ViperMKI Fighters
1 Cylon Raider
1 set of stars. Basically single point polys in a scattered configuration. For more stars, load another copy of this or clone it and of set it slightly for its rotation. Easy stuf remember.

LIGHTS
1 Key Light. This is a distant light with a value of 80% and I have it pointing in such a bien that it gives us a scary and erie look to the shot scraping across the no sé of our main Viper.

Engine Light Packages for The Vipers and the Cylon Raider. These are volumetric light rigs that we have on hand that simply bolt onto the fuselaje of each of the ships its designed for and produces the look of the engines. The Vipers are an interesting set up because their engines in LightWave are actually yellow/orange straight out of render but on the show they have ben color corrected in the compositing process to be blue. The reasons for this being done in the compositing process are unkno, but I suspect that early on in the mini-series someone said hey can you make those engines on the vipers blue instead of yellow? and the easiest bien for them to do this across a ton of shots already rendered out was to do a simple color correct. So to this day thats how its done and I will show you how to change the look of the Vipers engines with a simple color correction tol in Fusion later on.

In addition to these engine lights we will a los have cockpit lights and helmet lights to deal with for each Viper. These will have to be broken out as well, but because they are for the same ship type I can break them out into a single pass on their own together instead of separately for each ship. Same goes for the Engines for the Vipers, but the Cylon Raider will have to have its own Engines broken out independently because of that color correcting issue with the Viper engines. Otherwise I could do all the engines in a single pass and probably get away with it. Each scene is going to be diferent depending on your compositing neds. To be safe break each scene down as much as posible. Kep in mind though that with each additional break out pass you will be adding render time not only to your LightWave farm but a los for your compositing both for rendering and for interaction in the software while you work on it.

CAMERA SETINGS.

If we cant se anything well, we are screwed so thus a camera is in the scene and producing our wonderful render results. The settings made to the camera in the scene máster are absolutely critical as are the render globals. Setting these up properly in the scene máster assures that with each broken out render pass (scene file) made from it will be conformed to those camera settings not only for rendering settings like antialiasing, motion-blur but most importantly resolution. I nearly jumped from the loading docks at the Vancouver Film Studios lot (5 fet high, oh my) when I would get shot break outs from the Los Ángeles group - because for some reason every second or third file I would get would have out of whak camera settings from no A to odd ball resolutions. By making sure you set your camera and render globales correctly in the first place you avoid breaquíng out a scene with varying parameters hitting the Render Farm and ultimately wasting your time. Pléase note that I have traced this problem and others to the use of the dope shet scene editor in LightWave instead of using the process I am going to describe here to produce shot break outs. If you use the dope shet to do your break outs you are asking for trouble because of the fact that things are much more buried and easily forgotten about when doing break out of a scene for a show like Galáctica because you dont have to physically associate your actions with the mouse movements with what you are doing afecting the properties of whatever it is that you have to change from break out to break out. Thats why this process I am detailing here can be followed from top down and produce the same results each time by going step-by-step while you build in that muscle memory of actually doing it. I can break out upwards of 30-40 shots in an 8 hour day (yeah like we ever worked those, more like 14-16 if we were allowed to go home at points) if I am not constantly interrupted by a PA who cant chek his email because hes ben downloading spy ware along with mp3s on company time. Sigh. Having broken out several hundred shots on the second half of Season I alone and encountering just about every single scene error posible in the process, I know what I am talking about. What made it maddening of course was that the people (the L. A, group) handing these busted scenes over to me were the very people who trained me (some of them being so-called legends in the LightWave community, frankly in my opinión they are more like LightWaves albatross instead of legends) how to do this in the first place using this method and smacked me on the head when I made mistakes early on for the very same reasons, but tok ofense to it when I said hey you left this on and that was set wrong and its diferent from pass to pass in the same shot, what givesí". Thank the gods LightWave is the fastest rendering system on the planet because these guys scene break outs were huge time wasters not only in fixing them but if a mistake was missed, sucked up render-time. I am only Kat, and well I do miss things from time to time when each pass had something screwy with it on a consistent basis and i was forced into checking every single setting across the board to make sure they went it render correctly because management would never admit that the legends they hired actually sucked at basic LightWave operations. You know, its Hollywood. It was my ass if farm time was wasted so I developed this shot break out system to save it. But alas, I was reprimanded for doing just that. Even though I was a los saving their collective asses as well in doing so. Like I said before. Its Hollywood.

Anyway, my camera settings are going to be as follows. These are considered the series standard for Battlestar Galáctica with a couple of exceptions.
We render our CG out at 1280x720 with a píxel aspect of 1.0 (Square). But waití Isnt BSG an HDTV show? Absolutely it is but the reason for rendering at 720p instead of 1080p like you would expect us to is that to help us take the computer generated Edge of the image we simply resize our renders up to full Hd 1920x1080p in the very last step of the compositing flow in Fusion before adding film grain. This helps to kep render times do, gives us the look we want while a los keping the amount of data going th rouge the composite manageable especially when we have several dozen layers of images to work with in each of the composites we typically do on the show. Thinking ahead is god for you.

RENDER GLOBALS
Now lets talque about Render Globals. You notice that I have it turned of in my camera settings. Normally this is okay but when dealing with idiots (not you, but them"), I recommend you turn it on and then set your Render Globals to match for Anti-aliasing and Motion-Blur at this stage. This característica alone for me was worth the upgrade from 8.5 to 9.0 Thanks NewTek. Ensure that your Render Frame range is correct. As I mentioned earlier my settings are a little bit diferent for the motion-blur section. I hate the look of dithered motion-blur frankly. I would rather turn up the Anti-Aliasing when using the classic camera to Enhance Extreme (33 passes of Anti-aliasing) with Normal Motion Blur than use Enhanced High Anti-Aliasing (17 passes) and dithered motion-blur which takes the same amount of time to render it sems. Honestly when you are at the classic cameras highest level of A for Normal Motion-Blur with the advancements of LightWave 9.0 and now even more so with 9.2, that so-called studdering ghost look most peope associate with the Classic Cameras Motion Blur and LightWave in general, is efectively gone while at dithered Motion Blur at 17 passes of A still loks a bit gofy and has those damd cómic book printing style dots across your image. BAD. Motion blur doesnt have dots. Come on. Dithered motion-blur was original designed for use in fielded animation renders. Its of little use today when you have progressive frame formats as MASTERS and the kind of A speed that LightWave now has over above its already stupid fast processing from previous versións that make dithered, well look a bit dumb. But thats just me. I a los dont like the results of how it loks in the compositing process. Do what you want to in your Render Globals panel and your Camera panels for your scene máster, just ensure they are consistent and matched in your scene máster file so that ever file you create from this máster uses the same settings.

Moving on, once you have your Scene Master Settings finalized chek them again. Here is a quik chek list.

Is your Camera and or Render Globals Resolution Multiplier set correctly (100%)?
Are your Motion Blur settings correctí
How about your Anti-aliasing?
Ray tracing? You always want ray-traced shadows on to start with. But RT Reflectionsí Refraction?
For this example we wont ned these in the Scene Master but in your Key Light and possibly your Fill (Spinning Light or Radiosity pass) you will want at least RT Shadows and probably RT Reflection to. But lets not stress about this here.
Are your running lights rigs loaded? Engines? And anything else you ned to have in the final results turned on?
Is Ambient Light Intensity Set to 0% in your Global Illumination panel?
Particle Blur? Is it on? Do you ned it on? If so turn it on, if not, turn it of.
Segment Memory settings? Make sure you use the right ones for your farm.
Do you have anything turned on thats going to muk something up down the road like Radiosity if you dont ned it except in a radiosity passí Its easier to turn it of once here now, than it is to turn it of 45 times except that one time you ned it on.
Did you do a test render with everything on in the shot at a frame that has the most on screen to give you an accurate idea as to how your final shot is going to lok?
Are all your objects in the scene saved correctly so that if you loaded this scene bak up again its not prompting you for missing images?
Content Directory Rightí
Any plugins being used that dont play well on a network if you are rendering on a farmí.

All god? Ok now whatí Save? Well yah but read this next bit when you do that.

FILE NAMe CONVENTIONS - STAYING ORGANIZED NoW. I am going to touch on the delicate and somewhat controversial subject of file name conventions and directory structure.

If you work in a shop where artists and Render Farm people have to talque the same lenguage (anywhere that is serious) its and ocasionally have to speaque to people who have no business in working in VFX but signs your cheques, its best that everyone knows what everyone else is saying and you stik to it. Especially if your 3D people a los double as Compositors.

An established and agred to directory structure system with proper file revisión and naming conventions is like a language. So when your VFX producer says hey I ned you to take a look at the viper passes for BSG_303B_44x01 you know where to look for them regardless if he is asking for the 3D elements that make it up or the final output render or the rendered layers from the shot.

Here is a simple guide. On BSG we have a central (point of failure with no active bak up because they simply refuse to acknowledge they are not immune to disaster and like to live life dangerously against my recommendations) drive called the X drive.

This drive is simply a big fat fast RAID5 box (5.6TB) mounted and shared on a fast server with all the systems on the network seing it with read and write access and labeled as x:\ when they open up their Windows explorer. Under this main x:\ drive we have the following directories.
(Lightwave stuf)
objectsimages
scenes
Then we have a directory called Renders Episodic and under this we have a directory for each season, then each episode, then each shot number for each episode. From there it breaks down into each element for each shot complete with revisión numbers so you can find out where you are. And just for safety we have an _old folder. The underscore _ there helps to force the directory to be shown to you if you list the directory contents from alphabetically and well underscores come first before A". Nice and neat.

This directory matches the same structure as our Scenes directory, which has an episodic folder under it, then repeats as above in the following example.
x:\scenes\episodic\BSG_SeasonI\BSG_303B\BSG_303B_4 4x01\
So when you ned to find out if you have to go bak to fix something where it is for either a composite or the scene file that made the renders its easy to find your way.

Again scenes for that shot BSG_303B_44x01 can be found here: x:\scenes\episodic\BSG_SeasonI\BSG_303B\BSG_303B_4 4x01\
While your renders from that scene can be found here:
x:\Renders_Episodic\BSG_SeasonI\BSG_303B\BSG_303B_ 44x01\
And for the fun of it, your Fusion Composites would follow a similar structutre. Here is another example.
x:\FusionComps\BSG_SeasonI\BSG_303B\BSG_303B_44x01 \
Your LightWave images and objects directories should a los follow a similar structure so you can find stuf easily, same goes for your plates directory that you pull from transfer like TGA sequences for each shot and episode number. Breaque things up into categories that make sense, and stik with them. It will save you a lot of time in the end.
*Note that under each of these directories you will find either files and folders or both that contain revisión numbers in their file name that make some kind of lógical sense as to what it is.

Here is an example of our directory structure and naming conventions. Se the revisión number and how it has the full episode and shot number in the path?

Here the example above shows the file BSG303_042x08_R02_Master_R01.lws"
This means simply its Battlestar Galáctica, episode 303, shot number 042x08 Revisión 2 and the Scene Master Revisión 1. Why two revisión numbers in there? Well básically someone came up with two diferent takes on a scene or a slightly diferent change betwen them but presented them both for review to the producers. They tok their pik and that was revisión 2 (R02) and for our purposes in-house the Master_R01 just means that this is the Master Scene file R01 versión from which all shots broken out below that in the break out directory will a los have as an extensión. This bien if we ned to go bak to R01 found in the rot of this shot and make break outs from that we can understand that there is diference.

Ok, so now that you have your Master Scene file and you went th rouge the chek list above, save your Master scene.

Name it something like this if you are going to follow my example.
x:\scenes\myspaceshow_pilot\MSP_01x01\MSP_01x01_R0 1_Master_R01.lws Then we can start with the break out process. This is where it gets fun. Especially when you have to do 30 or 40 of these a day.

Here is my máster scene in Layout. Notice how the volumetric engine lights are still loaded, as well as the key (of screen) and the raider eye? Load everything in to your máster and then break it out pulling bits out you dont ned for each pass.

Step Two: Breaquíng out a Key Light Pass. On Battlestar Galáctica almost always our space scenes have a single key light in them. Its how the key light pass is broken out for render that gives the compositors the flexibility to control the two primary elements of how this pass breaks down thats critical.

In the old days, before buffer export technology, which is actually years ago, but for some mid-way on season I of our show, people had to break out their key light passes by hand, meaning that the Affect Specular and Diffuse setting for the key light would be toggled on or of for each pass (Diffuse pass has just Affect Diffuse enabled on the light and vice versa for specular key light pass). Today however we know much better.
We have render buffer exports. Joy. Even better is renderbuffer export support th rouge exrTrader.

To start I reload my Scene Master and immediately save it bak out as my Key Pass before I touch anything. This bien I can avoid the certain temptation to save over my Scene Master causing some serious damage if I change a bunch of stuf first. Maquíng a safety copy of your Scene Master is a god idea. Do it. Yeah.

Now that you have started the break out process of saving out scene files, make a directory under your shot number folder called Breakouts and in that directory save your Key Light Pass file so that the path two it would be like so.
x:\scenes\episodic\episodenumber\shotnumber\breako uts\BSG_X0X_01x01_KeyPass_R01.lws Replace whatever you ned to in that file name to make it sensible for you.

Now you can proced to break out just the key light.

Start by eliminating all lights but the key light. When you built your scene you did label it Key Light rightí Delete any other lights from the scene quickly th rouge the Classic Scene Editor in Layout.
We a los ned to kill of the stars in my shot here. They can be made in a separate pass on their own later. So get rid of them to.

In addition I ned to remove the engines, the cockpit and helmet lights for the viper pilots and the Raider eye which isnt just a light, its a los a set of objects. Those a los must go. When you have your stripped down key light scene this is the point depending on your compositing neds you make the determination if you want the Key light to be broken out for each ship as well, so you can adjust the results of the key light diffuse and specularity for each. I am going to kep it simple and leave it alone and just produce a single key pass scene file for the lot of thre craft.
We now ned to set up our saving options and render buffer exports which will split the Key Light out to Diffuse Color and Specular Color buffers and save the results to Open EXR format along with the Final Render result, an alpha channel and any other special buffers that I would like to select. This is where I will delve into the Open EXR plug-in saber from db&d called exrTrader for LightWave 3D.

Se how I only have a single light in the scene? Alos notice my settings. In the old days you would turn on and of the Affect Diffuse and Affect Specular buttons and save out separate scene files for each and render them independently from one another.

A massive waste of time when you have renderbuffer export technology like exrTrader.
YOU CAN FIND OUT MORE ON THE OPeNEXR FORMAT HERE
Chek out the db&w Open EXR Format File Saver with full LightWave 3D buffer
support here.

Step Thre: Key Light Pass Settings for Render Buffer Export with exrTrader, exrTrader from db&w is an Open EXR file saber that takes advantage of the diferent buffers LightWaves Rendering Engine has and sabes those buffers that you can choose out to a single Open EXR file (*.exr) or to múltiple files individually named and estored to individual directories all at once.

If you have exrTrader (its appróximately 60.00US and worth every penny) you can find and load it in the Image Processing tab as an Image Filter. Hit F8 to bring up the Effects panel and select processing to begin, hit the Add the image filter bar and find the exrTrader plug-in in the list. Then select the edit bar and hit properties for that plug-in. A quik note, if you have any other image processing tools in this list, make sure exrTrader is at the end of the list so that the results of those image processing plugins and tools are taken into account before the saving process is run during the render step.

You will be presented with a window much like the one here on the right. >>>>
Lets explore this window quickly. By default it comes up and has the Buffers Tab enabled and shows you that the Final Render Buffer is enabled. Below that is a description of what that buffer actually is in this case it is the final render of the scene exactly the same as what you would se hen you hit F9 and do a rendering directly in LightWave Layout. Below that is a drop down box that gives you the ability to load a pre-determined preset of selected buffers and the Pixel Type, plus other settings shown in the área directly below it. Maquíng a preset is a great idea so we will do one here once we turn on the buffers we ned, and change a setting or two.

You are going to want the Final Render Buffer on for everything, so leave it enabled". Change the píxel type however to 32bit Float. I use 32bit float pretty much exclusively now for anything I do in LightWave even if I dont really neded, because I have found that its better to have it as a choice instead of a 16bit versión when it comes to compositing certain elements together. By having those extra bits, you get more range out of LightWaves render right from the get go and that translates more or less in to what most people would associate with Film Latitude". In the compositing process this means you can Push the values in an image with say a Brightness/Contrast tol much further than an 8bit or 16bit image before it clips the limits of the brightest or darkest píxeles estored in the image.

Next drop down and select RGB Raw Color. I dont use this buffer in my composites so here we will turn it of by toggling the Enabled button so the checkmarque is gone. Select each buffer for what you ned in your composite. This tutorial is specific to how BSG does their compositing pipeline (or at least should). You may want certain buffers on and others of for use later. Do some experiments on your own to se what each buffer produces as a result in your compositing program.

Kep going so that you are only left with a list much like mine on the right here, ensuring that for each butter you have turned on, that you have 32bit float selected as the píxel type for each one as well.
When you get to Depth change your settings for the Minimum and Maximum to 0.0 and 100.00 respectively. Kep the scale at 1.0. I will explain later on how this is helpful down the road in Fusion.

Chek your settings again. Should look like mine here to the right. >>>>>>>>
Make sure you chance the Render Mode (Layout Only) Menú to Viper and Save Buffers.

Once you are god to go you can then make a preset by selecting the Presets tab on the top of the plug-in window and selecting save preset". Give this a useful name when you are prompted to do so and hit Global so all users can access it. Thats probably just you. But what the hell you have to pik something. I suggest making it a name like KeyLight_Preset_Rfct-Dif-Spec-Lum-Trans-Depth-Alpha or something along those lines so you know whats turned on in the preset simply by looking at the name of the preset itself. Save that preset and close down the exrTrader window.

You can now go bak to the render globales panel and under the output tab choose a RGB(A) set of saber options. If you are rendering over a network you will ned to choose a saber in the list of savable formats called OpenEXR Dummy". This saber tricks LightWaves Screamernet rendering engine and various render controllers into waiting for the Image Processing plug-in portion of the exrTrader component to complete and save out a file before shutting down the operación and moving on to a new frame to render.

OpenEXR Plug-in From db&w - exrTrader. Default Settings on startup.

here is the window for exrTrader again but now shown with only the buffers I ned turned on and 32bit Floating point selected as my píxel type.

While you are doing this make sure you select a path for the Open EXR Dummy Saver to an appropriately named file and folder consistent with your directory structure. Then do a test render and chek this directory to se if inded you have things set up right.
Once your test render is complete you can open it in Fusion5 and chek out the results selecting the diferent buffers visible there, or you can chek it out with TV Player (google that) or a similar Open EXR compatible format viewer that supports individual selection of Open EXR layers.

(Chek to make sure it rendered a frame correctly.).

Now that you have your Key Pass scene set up, save it again and then put it on the network stak for rendering while be break out our next scene. If you dont have a farm available, just move on and render out the scenes on your own spare time.

Under the render Globals Output Tab, select the Open EXR Dummy Saver. Click the tumb nail below to se.

Step Four: Fill Light Pass Settings for Render Buffer Export with exrTrader, and a free Spinning Light Rig for you to use.
Our next step is to break out the Fill Light Pass. A fill light pass in Battlestar Galáctica terminology is simply to make use of the spinning light trik to faq a Radiosity style render. This light set up isnt hard to build when you understand what it neds to do. For the purposes of this tutorial I am not going to get into how to build one. I am going to just include one. Ah yes. Straight from the archives of light rigs from Battlestar Galáctica to you, comes the 24fps 28 Distant Light Scalable Intensity Cluster. Tim Albe and I actually re-built the original spinning light clusters that Galáctica was originally using in-house because that one was producing some questionable results, producing frame flickering and texture popping on some models.
You can download this LWS scene here You are free to use it as you por favor. Just use it correctly.

It is designed for 24fps LightWave Scenes. You can load it into your existing scenes or fresh with a model to test it out by chosing Load Items from Scene in Layout and chosing all the ítems in the loader option window. Make sure you select all the lights contained. You can Skip the camera however as you wont ned it.

You will however ned to make sure you have your RT Shadows option is set to on when using this light Rig because this is how it works. In addition to this you will ned Motion-Blur Enabled to se the results properly. I highly suggest that you open this scene up on the side and chek out how it works and the render times it can bring in vs, full on Radiosity of any type. As the name of the file suggests, this Rig is set up so that you can scale the null the lights are parented to and they increase or decrease in their intensity. This makes it adjustable for any scene neds you might encounter. Very handy inded.

Chek out the screen shot of the Spinning Light loaded on its own into Layout. Study this scene closely and try it out.

I am going to go ahead and load this Rig into my Key Pass Scene instead of re-loading the Scene Master and then going th rouge the process of removing the engine and cockpit lighting for speed reasons. The reason for this is that when you are working with several dozen shots and have to move fast, its quicker to go from the break out of the Key Pass and then build your Fill Pass from that. Typically the two longest renders for a shot on BSG are going to be the key and fill passes. So I like to get them in there first. Especially the Key Pass because I can use it once its done to start blending the layers found in the Open EXR file immediately and then as the Fill pass comes of the network completed, I can throw that in to my composite and while making those tweaks my interactive and volumetric lighting is cooking and those are usually fast renders. Remember, this is about speed and eficiency in a render pipeline while remaining flexible. If it turns out I have to change the position of the Key Light in my Key Light Pass after its rendered, no problem. I can simply make that change after seing the render results and make that determination immediately if its required or not after it goes th rouge render while everything else for my passes is probably fine and doesnt ned any changes. This is the benefit of doing shot break outs in the first place.

Once I have my Fill Light Rig loaded into my Key Pass I ned to remove the Key Light or disable its affect specularity or affect diffuse or disable it in the Scene Editor. I like to get rid of it completely. The main reason why is that even though its disabled if you leave it in a scene, it still takes time for LightWave to make that determination during render and time to load the scene up itself. On large projects, leaving unnecessary gack in your scene even if its hidden, disabled or turned of is still going to take time to load and the render engine still has to evalúate that condition, and while it may sem trivial, it can add up to a lot of time really fast. One thing I learned on BSG th rouge my own observations (since I used to have to spend hours watching packet dumps from ScreamerNet nodes live in action to make sure things were rendering correctly since La consistently produced inconsistence scene files for their break outs from pass to pass, shot to shot), its absolutely critical to make sure you have clean scenes. What I mean but this is straight forwards. Dont use multi-layer objects unless you absolutely have to. Single Layer objects load faster, and can be moved around in a LightWave scene to the position they ned to be in 3D space before the actual rendering process begins quicker than multi-layer objects. Dont think this mattersí? Well grab a estop watch the next time you do a ScreamerNet render and watch the on-screen data presented to you. Time how long it takes to load a multi-layered object and then move it before you se the statement from ScreamerNet that its rendering Opaque Polygons and then make a note of it. Do the same test again with all the layers of that object brought down to a single layer and se how much of a diference there is. You will be very surpresad on large shots with huge objects how much of a diference this makes. In some cases on BSG it consumed upwards of 90% of the rendering time per frame. I cannot stress how important this is. Get into the habit when you build your objects to reduce them to the absolutely minimum amount of layers you ned to make it work for your scene.
Now that I have my key light deleted, I am going to save this scene file as my fill pass. Dont worry, I am going to go bak and change my save out and Open EXR buffer saber settings immediately once I have saved this scene with the proper file name.

Blow away your Key Light once you have your Spinning Light Rig Loaded.

Now that my scene file is saved as a Fill Pass using the same file naming conventions I described above, I ned to change my Open EXR Buffer Saver Options and the Saving Path for the Dummy Open EXR Saver.
For a Fill Pass I am going to use slightly diferent settings in my Open EXR Trader buffers than I did in the Key Pass, as I typically dont ned to have all of the same buffers selected, so lets do that now. I am a los going to make a Fill Pass Preset while I am at it so I can save time later.

Go bak to the Image Processing Tab (Press F8 and select processing and hit properties on the exrTrader Plug-in in the list below the Add Image Filter drop down menú bar, by right clicking on the plug-in instance and selecting properties).

(Chek out the options I selected for my fill pass).

Once I have my buffers selected, I am going to close this do, go to the Render Globals panel again do thre things. First, I am going to change my saving path for the exrTrader Open EXR Dummy and use an appropriate folder and file name with revisión number for this render to be saved out as under the Output Tab. The other is to go to the RenderTab and turn of Ray Trace Reflection, while leaving Ray Trace Shadows on because I have to have it on in order to achieve the correct faked radiosity results.

The reason why I turn of the RayTrace Reflection Options here for this type of scene is two fold. One, I already get my reflection lighting out of the Key Pass and two it will save me rendering time.

In some situations you may want to opt to leaving it on. After all global lighting does produce reflections that you might want to incorporate into your composite and by using a fill clúster like I have here, it produces those reflections accurately th rouge transparent surfaces and doesnt pik up the bak ground like in backdrop or image world radiosity/HDRI rendering set ups do on those surfaces which are dificult to deal with later on. In a more advanced tutorial I will show you how to work with those kinds of Radiosity render set ups.

The third and last thing I am going to do is turn of Particle Blur. Since there are no particles in the scene and even if I was breaquíng out a Particle Pass I would only ned particle blur on for that pass only. Maquíng a fill pass for volumetric particles specifically volume particles or sprites is for the most part stupid and a huge waste of time. In some scenes though, depending on what kind of object you are working with it might be neded to have it turned on if you have single point polys in your object for some unknown reason (usually a mistake) that ned to be blurred as well.

Once I have completed this portion of this step, I can now save this scene again. And move on. But first lets chek out the results of what this Fill Pass Light Rig is going to look like for my shot by doing a test render.

This frame rendered with my scene settings in about 7m54s on my system. Not bad at all. Certainly worth it if you save out to Open EXR format because now I have the full range of the image available to me vs, just an 8Bit TGA that mullet man insists is enough". Its not and he knows it. He just doesnt like EXR format because he cant load it into combustion and cant se the results. Its not my fault Combustion doesnt support it. Dinosaur apps from Autodesk/Discreet are no reason to take ofense over this buddy.

Anyway, chek out my frame here taken from the Final Render Buffer".

FILL PAS FRAMe RENDER - 7m54s.
Loks a lot like a radiosity render doesnt ití Dammed rights it does and renders fast and clean and a los is full 128bit. That means a 32bit Alpha Channel, and 32bits of Color per channel as well. But it doesnt estop there. I a los have buffers in there to and its all contained in one nice package.

Now that I have a god test render, I am again going to save this scene (maybe with another revisión number, god to do) and proced with the rest of the break outs after I toss this scene file onto my network.

STEP FIVE: BREAKING OUT THE CYLON RAIDER ENGINES.

This step is pretty straight forward and things are going to go a lot faster now. I am going to now reload my Scene Master, and deleete all the lights in it with the exception of the Cylon Raider Engines. I a los ned to Nuke the stars. We will do those last. But dont forget them.

I a los ned to deleete the light for the Cylon Raider Eye and the luminous eye objects that make the eye look like it streaks from side to side with a lag.

Remember, the Colonial Vipers engines ned to be color corrected later in compositing to change them from yellow/orange as they normally appear straight out of LightWave 3D to the series standard of blue-ish/coral.

Its much easier to do a shot break out from this point by going bak to the scene máster and reloading it rather than pulling the engine rigs in to my key or fill pass and then bolt them onto the ships. Same goes for the eye. Its simply faster and cleaner plus you always ensure you are putting things in the exact same place each time because you are not actually putting things in you are removing things already there from what efectively is a template.

Kat =^.^=.

Once I have the shot set up with everything gone that I dont ned, I go bak to my Render Globals panel and choose my saber output path for the Cylon Raider engines using the Dummy Open EXR Saver.

I then go over to the Image Processing panel (remember, F8 to bring it up quick) and get my exrTrader Buffers set. I am going to use the preset I made for the Fill Pass here because if I want to suppress say, the luminosity of the helmets of the Viper Pilots I already have that channel available to me in the composite from the Key Pass. Brilliant.

Lets chek it out.

One last thing though, which I always have setup regardless, because its a default scene attribute that I use no matter what, just to be save, is that I have Flare2Alpha inserted just above the exrTrader Suite. This will ensure I have an alpha channel to work with for my engines or any other flare/volumetric properties to these lights and that the Flare2Alpha Image Processing Plug-in takes Effect before the saving step does in exrTrader, capturing the results in the final render buffer image.
Now that I have this pass ready to go, I can move on to the next step. But first, save my scene something consistent with my file naming conventions, and throw it onto the network for render.

STEP SIX: BREAKING OUT THE CYLON RAIDER EYE.

Now because of the bien this shot is designed, the Vipers never obscure the Cylon Raider or its Eye Light, and its unable to affect the surfaces of the Vipers at all for two reasons. 1. The Raider is facing away from the Vipers (this is a chase after all) and 2. The Cylon Raider Eye itself has a Linear Fall Of to it. So beyond 25cm or so its not going to contribute light to any objects beyond that whatsoever. For the purposes of sped, during scene load and actual rendering on the network, I am going to remove the vipers completely from this pass. If however an object crossed in front of the Raider Eye, it would have to remain in the scene to obscure it correctly when it did so over the course of the animation. Same goes with any kind of light set up that is going to ned to be obscured and that goes for Engines, Helmet Lights, Key Lights, etc. If something is going to pass in front of it and that something is betwen your object, light or particle and the camera it neds to be there at some point in one of the passes. Its just easier on the compositor of course to do it practically here rather than them using another passs alpha channel to do it in the composite later on. Not to mention faster.

Again, I Nuke all the nonessential stuf. The stars, Key light, all of the engines, the vipers. Because the Vipers engines and cockpit lights/helmet lights are all attached to each other I can simply deleete the main viper object or flight máster null (everything on the show has one or should because of this) and it takes out anything below it as I dont ned the vipers in the scene at all, at least for this pass.

For my exrTrader Settings I am going to use the same ones that I saved in my preset for the Fill Pass, then make my changes to my save out path and save the scene as RaiderEyeLightPass before throwing on the farm for rendering.

Chek out the openGL representation of the scene. Notice just a hint of the Effect on the raider and the eye plates. Its kind of a gofy Rig so its Effect isnt really shown until you put it into composite and cranque its levels.

Ok so I am bak after a few days of playful gle after my copy of Worley Labs Fprime3 was releaed to me. OH WOW.
Kats love Fprime.
Continuing on now, I have my RaiderEye Pass and the Engines for the Raider as well rendered out. Lets take a look quickly at the results of the Eye put into my composite.

Now lets take a look at a screen capture of Fusion5 to se how this flow is looking so far.

(Make note of my Film Grain Settings and how I have my FG/BG Merge Settings for each pass as I stak the layers together).

Lets get bak now to finishing up our shot break outs in LightWave so we can get the rest of this composite happening.

STEP SEVEN: BREAKING OUT THE COLONIAL VIPeRS.

Viper Engines:
Keping up the momentum now with getting things out of LightWave and into Fusion so we can finish our shot, the next set of passes we have to take on are the Colonial Vipers Engines, Cockpit Lights and Helmet Lights. I am going to start with the Engines first since those are more sexy than helmet lights. Unless your into helmet or something. I dont know. Dont asque dont tell rightí
Ok, bak to the Scene Master. Once I have it reloaded I am immediately going to blow away the Engines, Eye Light and Eye LumObjects for the Raider. I am going to kep the raider itself in the shot here just in case it passes in front of the engines and they are being obscured. I probably could blow it away, but for the purposes of the tutorial I am going to just kep it in there. I a los ned to remove the Helmet and Cockpit Lighting Rigs, the Key Light, and stars.

Once I have all that taken care of I again ned to set my saving path for the Dummy EXR Saver in the render globales panel and then set my buffer saber options in the exrTrader Plug-in itself. Remember to insert flare2alpha before the buffer saber though in the image processing list or you wont get any alpha channel for your engines since they are technically a kind of a Lens flare to LightWave.

This time around I am going to only use the following buffers.

SELECTED BUFERS FOR ENGINE PAS (VIPeRS).

Final Render (32bit Float)
Alpha (32bit Float)
Diffuse Color (32bit Float)
Specular Color (32bit Float)
Luminosity (32bit Float)
Transparency (32bit Float)
Dr. Pepper (Makes a Great Float)

(Lets Chek out a screen shot just for fun).

Staying in form, we can again save this pass out using appropriate namage and throw it onto the farm.
Kat =^.^=.

Viper Cockpit Lights:
Same process again here, reload my scene máster and continúe, but this time I ned to remove the engines for the raider, the eye light and its supporting objects, the vipers engines, helmet lights, the key light and stars.

I am going to use the same buffer settings for my exrTrader plug-in as I used on the engines. Once thats set up and I have my saving path set, I can save this pass out as my Cockpit Lights pass and again, throw it into render.

You can se this process gets faster now that you have built up a memory of where things are and how to get rid of them. You just have to remember what you are actually producing as a pass clear in mind. So as to not confuse myself, I usually have a note pad open on my desktop and chek each pass out and make a text file as part of my Render Farm management process, copying and pasting the names of the final passes, and the paths to them to that notepad and going down the line as I complete my shot break outs, checking things of one by one. This is part of the reason why I go bak to a scene máster most of the time because I cant look at it and say oh, I am building a key pass because thats what the file name in the LightWave window says for my current scene". Its going to say SceneMaster in there somewhere so no matter what I am going to know I am building something out of that máster, and to not save over top of it.

Lets finish up with the vipers now by breaquíng out the Helmet Lights.

Viper Helmet Lights:
Still going faster (I actually broke out both these passes before writing this in less than 5 minutos.utes, if that), I reload my SceneMaster to begin. The Viper Helmet Lights Pass neds to have everything for lights (engines, key light etc) taken out of it. I a los Nuke the stars and the raider eye objects. Again, I use the same exrTrader buffer saber options as before, save my path out and then save this scene file for immediate rendering.

STEP EIGHT: BREAKING OUT THE STARS.

No, this isnt a reality TV show, its the final step that we ned to do in LightWave 3D before we continúe on to complete the compositing process once we have all our passes rendered out.

Again, I reload my SceneMaster, and deleete all of the objects in the shot with the exception of course, my Star objects. I have loaded several diferent star spheres, which have slightly diferent loks to them or copies of the same object and have rotated them to offset their appearance to camera and thus fill in a lot of blak space.

Once I have that done, I ned to remove all the lights in the scene but this is probably going to be pretty easy since I have most of the lights parented to objects so when I Nuke the objects the lights go with them if you choose to deleete the descendants of an object at the same time. BUT WAIT. LightWave neds to have at least one Light in a Scene at all times. The simplest and fasted bien to remove the effects of the last light remaining is to hit the properties panel for the light and turn of affect diffuse and affect spec. Alternativaly you could turn the value of the light to 0% or disable it in the scene editor. Choice is yours.

I am not going to use exrTrader for this pass. Its just simply over kill, so I am going to save the stars out as 32bit TGA files. I want the alpha in there for maximum tweak-ability in comp. Once this is done I ned to chek one thing in my camera panel. And that is to make sure I have changed Particle Blur from Of to On". Because my scene máster has it of, I only ned to turn it on once in this particular set up. Where as if I went the other way, I would have to turn it of 7 times out of 8 passes. Make sense? This is an extreme example, as most of the time you could leave particle blur on and not take a huge hit in render times but you never know. Thats why I dont leave it on th rouge all of my scene passes and only enable it for when its required.

Now that this bit is taken care of, I can save out my scene, and get it into render. If you have a network controller that allows Shifting priorities of your passes around from lowest to highest and vice versa, throw the stars in at the top or move them to the top of your list. They will render ultra fast and we can pull them into the composite immediately and fell better that space is not some huge Empty void. At least in our shot.

Shot Breaque Out Summary.

So as you can se here by following these steps, this shot break out went by rather quik when you pull out all of my ranting In total I should be able to break a shot out like this in less than 15-20 minutes, if not faster. This was a simple shot to do of course with not a lot of things in it that ned separate attention in compositing, but the fundacións of how to do a shot break out are the same even on larger shots. If I neded to break out an armada of Cylon Raiders for example (Episode 209 Flight of the Phoenix is a great example from Battlestar Galáctica Season I, I broke all that Shift out myself) I would do it in groups, making scene masters for certain portions of the shot and then proceding from each scene máster in a similar manner. It all comes down to your scene neds and what you have available to you for rendering power. Big scenes take more Ram and more CPU time to crunch. Breaquíng them out in to several cylon reduced diet scenes makes them manageable for Render Farms of lighten proportions, but can explode into an organizational headache. What pass goes with who?
That is why I created this break out process so that I always have what I ned to go bak if I screw up and I shouldnt really screw up because if I build my scene máster and or sub-masters correctly using the same settings from those, the tree of break outs below those masters will be consistent.

Remember, it doesnt matter how big your farm is, if your shots are broken out in a bien that your compositors cant make sense of or cant use because its not done right, you are wasting not only Render Farm time twice over (once for the mistake, once to fix it) you are a los wasting your time and your compositing teams time and energy. I got this right away, but on Season I things fell apart really quickly because some of this process went down to a junior in La (but the guy who trained me was sitting right fucking next to him and they STILL COULDNT GET IT RIGHT.) - which ended up being more or less a disaster and a huge waste of money when they hired another guy here locally to take the shot break outs of my plate completely. Never put two juniors who dont have any compositing experience let alone fail to understand what they are doing when they are breaquíng out shots and why certain things ned to be done certain ways in a position like this. Its a critical point of failure if you do so and it will fail. Then people start making secret phone calls while out for a cofe break blaming you for the whole mess, complaining to the Ell Ehy group management people, while bucking for a promotion to pay for additional hormone therapy.
This is part of the reason while I will never by choice work again with a 3D team that doesnt have the ability themselves to comp their own shots and that means from the top down. Scene construction, break out, render management, compositing. In other words LightWave Generalists who can a los composite their shots are worth they weight in gold. Literally. The amount of money BSG pissed away in lost time over mistakes in the shot break out process was and remains absolutely staggering and it afected all of the diferent internal departments of the VFX team. Management to Compositing. When they started to Cut me out of the process, things started to go wonky. You can actually se the change from one episode to the next. Bad Management Choice.

Now that blame is squarely and correctly placed on the shoulders of those responsible I can breathe a bit easier. Although I am still unemployed regardless. But I shall have my revenge. MUHAHAHAHAH.

Fusion Compositing Tutorial.

Ok so now that all my renders are compleete, I can begin the process of constructing my Fusion5 flow. This tutorial is not going to teach you how to run Fusion. Only how to deal with the Open EXR images and the buffer options we used in the break out process to bring together the composite and how we composite space scenes on the show. For more información on Fusion5, chek out www.eyeonline.com
The compositing process while on the surface may sem daunting, is really very straight forward. While the terminology I will be using is going to be geared towards Fusion5 as the compositing tol, the methods described here can be translated into any compositing package. This tutorial however is specifically designed to take advantage of Open EXR format color depths and the buffer saber technology from exrTrader with Fusion. If you are not able to work with Open EXR files, I highly suggest you do a gut chek and ditch your current compositing application for one that does. Alright now, lets begin.

Step One: Brining in the Fill Pass and Tweaquíng it for flavor.

The first thing I am going to do is set up my flow to work at 1920x1080 with a 1:1 aspect ratio, set for 24FPS. Also, I want to look my color depths at 128bit so whenever I bring in a loader that is EXR format its automátically going to be set to 128bit color depth. Thats 32bits per channel for RGB plus Alpha or anything else for a buffer selected on save out from LightWave and exrTrader. Once I have that done I can bring in the first loader which will be my fill pass sequence.

Here is a screen shot of the Fill Pass Loaded into my composite.

When I pull this loader in, by default I am going to get what I want for buffer selections. This is one of the rare occasions where this happens. The fill pass requires me to use the RGB+A of the Final Render buffers from exrTrader. If I wanted to get fancy I could load the fill pass twice and split the Difusión Color Buffers and the Specularity Color Buffers out and mix them independently as the light Rig used does produce Specular información bounced of the object and bak into the LightWave camera. Note that this would only happen with a fill ball pass and not a radiosity pass as background radiosity doesnt generate Specular lighting información. For the purposes of this composite I dont ned to do that and I can work with the RGB+A final render buffer image información for my fill pass and continúe with out much hassle.

Now lets adjust that fill pass with a Brightness/Contrast tol to bring it line with the bien we composite it into the shots on the show. Pull a B/C Tol into your flow and connect the fill pass to it, and then drag the BC tol over to one of your preview panes. With the B/C Tol selected you can now drop your Gain level down to around 0.4 or 0.375. Alos make sure you turn of Alpha in the Radioactive Tab área. When brigging in all your loaders. I dont know why (hey I am not really a compositor) but for some reason it sems posible to adjust the BC of the alpha channel in Fusion down stream from the loader with color correction tools.

Loks kinda dark huh? Well the reason we even ned a fill pass is rather simple, it fills in áreas that would otherwise be lost to Darkness in a straight out single key light render. But we dont ned it full on so as to compete with the key light. How much you knok it down is highly dependent on the scene but we generally knok it down to the levels I mentioned above when working with the image material in 128bit. The idea is to Push it as far down as it will go without having it clip to total black". Space is never 100% devoid of light. This is what we called space black". Whatever that is.

Anyway, now that this is loaded and we can se the results its time to bring in the Key Light Pass and take advantage of those render buffers.

Here is a screen shot of the Fill Pass with my B/C Tol adjustment.

Step Two: Brining in the Key Pass using a single image to get two layer elements th rouge exploitation of the buffers supported in Open EXR format combined with exrTrader.

There are two sections to this step. First loading in the Key Pass Files and chosing the Difusión Color buffer with alpha and then again but for the Specular Color buffers plus alpha. Together these combine, mixing in other tools betwen the merges brigging them together as one with the fill pass to get the desired results.

I am going to load my first portion of the Key Pass to use as my Difusión Color layer in my composite for the ships. Once I have it loaded I ned to change my buffer selection under the format tab of the loader to be Dif. R for Red, Dif. G for Green and Dif. B for Blue. Pléase note that Fusion for some stupid reason loads an EXR file with the buffers for things like Spec Color and Diffuse Color BGR and not RGB which is the proper sequence of color channels according to the open standard. So you will have to watch what you are doing to make sure you get the right color for color in these layered pass components. Once you have your buffer for Dif Color selected into the proper color channels of the fusión file loader go ahead and bring in another B/C Tol and just pop the gain of the image up a bit to say 1.13. After that you can bring in a merge tol and join the Fill Pass and the Diffuse Color Pass together. When you do this make sure you turn of Merge Alpha on the merge tol.

You want to blend the Diffuse Color Pass OVER TOP of the Fill Pass by piping in the Diffuse Color B/C Tol output to the green point on the Merge Tol and the Fill Pass B/C Tol output into the brownish point on the same merge tol. The idea is green is grass, brown is ground. Grass over ground.

Now you ned to change the blending (for you After Effects people, but its called Apply in fusion) mode of the merge tol to be screen". Remember to turn of Alpha in the merge tol radiation tab. Otherwise you will start to build up a halo around your images.

Now you can se the purposes of the Fill Pass. It takes those ultra dark áreas of the ship and reveals them slightly.

The second portion of this step is to bring in the Key Pass again but choose the Specular Color buffer channels for RGB in the file loader. Once you have that happening you can again bring in another merge tol down stream from the previous one and screen it over top of your basic composite.

Now were rocking and rolling but some of you might be asking. whats the point of having the Key Pass split into two like this? Well thats a god question. By having the specular pass loaded on its own we can treat separately from the diffuse color and fill completely and jak it up, Apply Glow, brightness contrast tools to give it that special touch. We are going to do that next.

Here is a screen shot of the Fill Pass Merged with the Key (Difusión Color) Pass. Notice the Dark Areas of the ships are no longer totally blak as you se on the left which is the Key (Difusión Color Pass) on its own.

Here is a screen shot of the results from having the Fill Pass merged with both elements of the Key Pass - Difusión Color and Specular Color.

Simple as one, two, thre.

Step Thre: Pushing the limits with Brightness/Contrast tools and Glow for the Specular Color portion of the Key Pass.

My next tasque is to pump up that Specular Color element so it pops out of the image.

In order to do this I ned to insert some tools betwen the loader for the Key Specular Color element and the merge which brings it over the other two pass elements. These tools are going to be a brightness contrast tol and then a Glow tol in that order moving down stream towards the merge tol.
When I bring in the Brightness Contrast Tol, the first thing I am going to do is turn of alpha. I am doing this like on my other tools that deal with color for two reasons. 1. I dont want to touch my alpha in anyway from any of the passes and 2, by turning it of in the tol I am actually saving some render time later on as well as speding up the interactivity while working with my composite because Fusion can simply ignore treatment of the alpha channel when it hits these tools as it processes the images.

My values for the B/C tol are going to be specific to Open EXR format images because of the amount of dynamic range they support. If you are working with 8bits per color channel images like TGA and try to Apply these settings you are going to bash your image results beyond what they physically contain and they will clip. Thats the reason why Open EXR kicks ass. You can Push the tools further than typically allowed with 8bit images like TGA files and still have head rom before they clip in either direction blowing out to white or going super black. These numbers will a los change based on how bright your key light was in the first place. If you change your brightness value for your key lights from scene to scene your values will ned to be adjusted in the composite from scene to scene as well. Kep that in mind. Every scene is diferent and this is art. Its what loks god, not always whats physically accurate.

Lets review my values for my Key Pass Specular Color B/C Tol.

Gain = 4.07
Gamma = 1.57
Contrast = 0.0 (untouched)
Brightness = 0.0 (default)
Saturation = 1.0 (default).

Now I can set up the Glow tol which is immediately down stream from the B/C Tol I just made the adjustments above to.

First, turn the Alpha of.

Next, try these Glow settings.

Set your Glow tol to Gaussian"
Glow Size = 8.29
Glow = 0.8
Bland = 0.353.

Make sure your Apply mode is set to Normal in the Glow tol just below the sliders where you entered these values.

Now you can bring in another merge (remember to turn that alpha of), and screen the results of your glowy Key Pass Specular buffer Effect treated element over top of the other two passes using the screen Apply mode.

Lets chek out our results shall we? Se the images to the right.

Here is a screen shot with the Key Pass Specular Color buffers selected and treated with the B/C and Glow Tools

And now the results of those passes mixed together. Se, it really is as simple as one, two, thre.

From here things get pretty obvious but I will continúe on those other passes like the engines and additional lighting later. Here is a test composite though with all of the elements combined. I ned to do some tweaquíng to the stars however but thats okay. Its just an example. Fel free at this point to render out your composite and se the results thus far at this stage of the process. Remember tweak the settings so they look god to you but still real like".

Chek out my composite test here.

More to come son.

Kat =^.^=.

Publicacion oficial: http://www.battlestarvfx.com/bsg_tut...ndlighting.htm